The High Life: On CBD

The Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission is severely fucked up and not in a good way, like stoned, but like someone you see that is about to tip over but miraculously remains standing at an impossible angle. The problem is, people suffer while these fuckers nod.

First, they get too many applicants, so there is a delay during which people with conditions that could be treated with cannabis suffer. Then they finally pick the vendors that will be able to produce medical cannabis and they pick primarily white-owned businesses. I mean, seriously? A majority of people arrested for weed are black and you can't see that it might be important to get some black businesses using it for medicine? This white washing has again caused a delay during which people with conditions that could be treated with cannabis suffer.

You, Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission, are prolonging suffering.

In light of this hopelessly fucked commission, the legislature needs to give us a referendum like citizens in so many other states have had that would allow us to decide whether we as a state want recreational cannabis. Then we could essentially ignore the doofuses on the medical commission and medicate ourselves as we've been doing but with better quality control and no risk of jail.

As it happens, I am writing this after minor but rather painful medical experience: a vasectomy. Before I got the snip, the doctor wrote me a prescription for Tylenol with codeine. I didn't want it because I didn't want the Tylenol—hard on the liver—so they agreed to give me a prescription for pure codeine, which it turns out was unavailable. And since the procedure was done on Friday, the doctor was already gone by the time I called. I left a message but no one got back with me.

So I took a little of the acetaminophen stuff because it hurt pretty damn bad at a sensitive spot, but I took very small amounts and supplemented it with a hash called Bombshell, which is primarily the CBD-heavy strain Compassion dusted with kief from Mango Haze (a strong and wakeful sativa).

CBD, cannabidiol, is one of the many compounds in the cannabis plant that excites medicinal advocates because it has a wide range of potential benefits and, unlike THC, is not psychoactive. Compassion is one of the varieties bred to be high in CBD and low in THC (which is why, if you also like being high, you get it with the kief dusting). I'd tried the hash a couple weeks earlier when I felt like I'd pulled some kind of internal muscle in my belly playing a rock n' roll show. I've long believed in medical weed and know I use it to self-medicate for all sorts of things. I know, depending on the strain, it can help me focus or help me sleep. It can help me get outside of myself for a good ethical scouring. It can make me hungry, help me deal with stress, make me feel better.

But with the rock n' roll injury I was learning how good it can be for physical pain. And the Compassion worked wonders. It's like that thing where you are tense and wince each time you move. You take a couple puffs and then… you exhale and your body feels a little more limp.

So after the surgery the hash helped me sleep and ease any nausea that came from the codeine. But I really wanted to get off the narcotic and I wanted to be able to vape instead of smoke hash because coughing with sore balls is the worst. So I got ahold of some Compassion flower dusted with the sativa Agent Orange. It has a complex odor that is subdued compared to so any of the bright loud strains and its effect is sublime. My pain sort of slipped away while I felt generally at ease, my body relaxing, the ache in my nuts becoming dull, as my mind grew alert and engaged.

Along with that, I mixed just a bit of kratom into a smoothie. Kratom is a plant that is botanically related to coffee but chemically similar to opioids, insofar as it connects with certain, but not all opioid receptors. A few weeks ago I'd never heard of kratom, but when the DEA announced an emergency scheduling action to make it Schedule 1 along with weed and heroin, I began to look into it and discovered that numerous people are using it to treat opioid addictions. But they are also using it to ease the same kind of pain that people take things like Tylenol 3 for. Things like cut nuts. But when you get the snip, the worst of it is that kicked-in- the-nuts feeling you get in your stomach. Nothing helps that, but it is close enough to nausea that the CBD made a dent. So if the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission is on the nod, the legislature needs to step up and allow citizens to treat themselves. Criminalize the commissions and legalize the medicine.